Surgery denotes an operation of curing a disease by cutting, incising, or processing skin, membranes, and other tissues by using a medical instrument. In addition, laparotomy that cures, shapes, or removes an organ by cutting and opening the skin of a surgical site may cause bleeding, side effects, pain of a patient, scars, etc. Therefore, surgery performed by inserting only a medical instrument, e.g., a laparoscope, a surgical instrument, a microscope for microsurgery, etc. into the skin after forming a predetermined hole through the skin, or surgery using a robot has been recently considered as an alternative.
A surgical instrument is an instrument having an end tool provided at an end of a shaft that passes through a hole in the skin, so that a doctor directly manipulates the end tool with his/her own hands via a predetermined driver or manipulates the end tool by using a robot arm to carry out an operation on a surgical site. The end tool provided at the surgical instrument performs a pivoting operation, a gripping operation, a cutting operation, etc. via a predetermined structure.
However, the surgical instrument according to the related art has the end tool that is not bent, and thus, it is not easy for the surgical instrument to access the surgical site and to perform surgical operations. Surgical instruments having an end tool that may be curved have been developed to address the above problem; however, operations of a manipulator for curving the end tool or performing surgical operations are not intuitively identical with actual bending of the end tool or actual surgical operations of the end tool, and thus, it may not be easy for an operator to intuitively manipulate the surgical instrument and it takes the operator a long time period to be skilled to use the surgical instrument.
The information in the background art described above was obtained by the inventors for the purpose of developing the present disclosure or was obtained during the process of developing the present disclosure. As such, it is to be appreciated that this information did not necessarily belong to the public domain before the patent filing date of the present disclosure.